shows a woman heartened by the same hopes and tortured by the same
agonies, there is still a vast difference between them, and that
difference is the measure of the author's progress in his craft during
the eleven years between 1900 and 1911. "Sister Carrie," at bottom, is
no more than a first sketch, a rough piling up of observations and
ideas, disordered and often incoherent. In the midst of the story, as I
have said, the author forgets it, and starts off upon another. In
"Jennie Gerhardt" there is no such flaccidity of structure, no such
vacillation in aim, no such proliferation of episode. Considering that
it is by Dreiser, it is extraordinarily adept and intelligent in design;
only in "The Titan" has he ever done so well. From beginning to end the
narrative flows logically, steadily, congruously. Episodes there are, of
course, but they keep their proper place and bulk. It is always Jennie
that stands at the centre of the traffic; it is in Jennie's soul that
every scene is ultimately played out. Her father and mother; Senator
Brander, the god of her first worship; her daughter Vesta, and Lester
Kane, the man who makes and mars her--all these are drawn with infinite
painstaking, and in every one of them there is the blood of life. But it
is Jennie that dominates the drama from curtain to curtain. Not an event
is unrelated to her; not a climax fails to make clearer the struggles
going on in her mind and heart.

It is in "Jennie Gerhardt" that Dreiser's view of life begins to take on
coherence and to show a general tendency. In "Sister Carrie" the thing
is still chiefly representation and no more; the image is undoubtedly
vivid, but its significance, in the main, is left undisplayed. In
"Jennie Gerhardt" this pictorial achievement is reinforced by
interpretation; one carries away an impression that something has been
said; it is not so much a visual image of Jennie that remains as a sense
of the implacable tragedy that engulfs her. The book is full of artistic
passion. It lives and glows. It awakens recognition and feeling. Its
lucid ideational structure, even more than the artless gusto of "Sister
Carrie," produces a penetrating and powerful effect. Jennie is no mere
individual; she is a type of the national character, almost the
archetype of the muddled, aspiring, tragic, fate-flogged mass. And the
scene in which she is set is brilliantly national too. The Chicago of
those great days of feverish money-grabbing and cr